A two-minute video clip featuring the founder and driving force of Bird Buddy, Franci Zidar, was played as part of the CNN Business section. In the video clip, the creators note that the smart bird house, together with the accompanying app that identifies and describes the birds that feed in the house, raises bird watching to another level.

The creators state nature protection as one of the main goals of the project, as they believe that the data collected by means of the smart house will be very useful for environmentalists, both in terms of changes in bird populations and in monitoring the annual migrations of various species. This data will be freely available to the scientific community on an open-source basis.

Meanwhile, in early December, Bird Buddy received a new US$8.5 million financial injection as part of a new fund-raiser for start-ups. According to the Crunchbase platform, the investor was the company General Catalyst, based in Cambridge in the US state of Massachusetts. On this occasion, Zidar told the TechCrunch portal that the purpose of the project was, among other things, to connect people with nature and turn passive bird watchers into active ones.

Bird Buddy was also named the Slovenian Start-up of the Year last June, having already raised EUR 4.2 million on the global online crowd-funding platform Kickstarter in just over a month.

Its product is a smart bird feeder, the basic set of which features a bird house with a food container and a removable module that features a small video camera with a microphone and a motion sensor.

The sensor detects the arrival of a bird and notifies the owner of the feeder via a wireless connection and a mobile app. The owner can then take a photo of the bird using the app. By means of artificial intelligence, the app recognises the species of the bird, enables users to edit and share photos of birds and offers them advice on what food is suitable for individual species of birds.